We are really cracking away at the restoration of the 1950 Ferrari 166 Berlinetta and at this point, I am fitting and re-fitting and adjusting and fitting again all of the parts to this car. Nothing worked or fit very well from new as you may have seen from an earlier post on welding up brass trim caps and since then I have learned that the window regulators would bind up because they were miss-aligned and the side glass fit terribly but with tons of time and effort, everything is working and looking great.

These are the door handles that I have sent off to be chrome plated. Notice the detail in the “scrapings” and in the “sunburst” at the release button? When you depress this button the handle pops out allowing you to pull the handle which releases the door catch followed by pulling open the door.

This detail will be eliminated in the re-chrome plating process but with modern technology, we can recreate the detail easily right down to the minor imperfections.

Touring Door handles

Ferrari Axle Components

The axle in this Ferrari was starting to whine and had lots of noise on deceleration so instead of doing further damage, I advised owner to have us break it down and inspect the parts. It turns out that the major parts are worn and damaged so we have to replace the ring and pinion and all of the bearings.

Since we have to change the ring and pinion gears as they are pitted and nasty, I am going to change the ratio from 7-32 to 8-34 for a more relaxed engine speed at cruising. I am also going to re-engineer the pinion bearings from the hideously undersized ball bearing and sliding inner race roller bearing to a pair of Timken Tapered Roller bearings, a design  every other manufacturer uses with great success.

Ferrari pinion bearing race

There were a bunch of leads as to why this engine overheated but we aren’t sure exactly which problem led to its demise. The water pump looked nasty, maybe it failed and blew all the water out of the weep hole or maybe the head gasket failed. Once we finally got the case split, we found that the cylinder protrusion on the 7-12 bank was .007-.012″ where it should be about .003″ from the deck surface so the gasket may not have sealed around the water passages.

Since the engine was burning a little bit of oil when it ran and the 2nd gear synchro needed to be replaced, it reinforced the need to overhaul this drive train. We are thinking of enhancing the engine with slightly higher compression pistons and increasing the flow by matching the intake manifolds and testing and enhancing the intake and exhaust ports.

A problem with the Ferrari Boxer design arises when you wash the car or drive it in the rain and water pools around the main bearing studs causing a major corrosion issue between the case and the studs, “gluing” the halves together. We made steel blocks that use the main bearing nuts to push the halves apart as you un-thread them but it didn’t work at all. We ended up making hardwood wedges to drive in with a hammer and 3 portable hydraulic cylinders so after nearly a week of labor the job was finally done.

Have a look at the massive amount of corrosion on the studs!

Boxer engine

12 cylinder horizontally opposed

Case halves BB, BBI